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/239/ Against Justice ft. Ross Wolfe (Patreon)

Published:
2022-02-01 07:01:02
Imported:
2024-07
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On the critique of egalitarian ideology.

We talk to writer Ross Wolfe about his essay "Marxism Contra Justice". Given that struggles for justice have been central to all sorts of radical movements, why is it important to cleave Marxist politics away from this notion? How are contemporary notions of 'social justice' already degraded versions of earlier egalitarian ideology on the left? Is it possible to conceive of any popular working-class movement that doesn’t begin with people’s sense of indignation and desire for redress?

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Grant Baird

Agree with what other commenters say with regards to the gap between theory and reality and the lack of any working class movement is perhaps a conclusion of this, amongst various other reasons obviously. Ross’s opposition to the sanders and Corbyn projects and electoral politics in general may seem like a solid position but, in my view, in order for reality to catch up with theory and perhaps push institutions and mindsets leftwards, albeit incrementally, voting for either would be worthwhile even if the long term goal can never be achieved through electoral politics.

dshamz_

On the question of justice, the notion that you can’t critique a society on the basis of ideological conceptions that arise from that society strikes me as being incorrect, because if it was, the critique would be coming from nowhere, from pure thought, which would be undialectical and unmaterialist. It seems to me that the only basis from which you can critique a society is actually with ideas that *are* produced from that society (which we do not stand outside of), including notions of justice, because in a society that has material contradictions, those contradictions will also be embedded in the contradictory ideas that the society generates. It’s not that justice is a capitalist idea, it’s that the capitalist idea of justice is contradictory, which means that it contains a kernel of truth - and the meaning of justice will be struggled over by contending class forces regardless of whether we think such a thing exists or not. I know Marxism is about interests and is not moralism, and ‘social justice’ is an entirely bullshit concept, and I’m not saying that we should take the notion of justice to be key to any given organizing strategy, but so long as contradictory conceptions of justice exist - which they will so long as class society exists - contradictory conceptions of injustice will exist, and this is terrain we have to navigate in practice.